


Bigger on the Inside

by alestar



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Future Doctor, Gen, OFC - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-24
Updated: 2015-10-24
Packaged: 2018-04-27 21:33:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,515
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5065045
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alestar/pseuds/alestar
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The TARDIS runs out of rooms.  Prompt: <em>coming of age</em>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bigger on the Inside

**Author's Note:**

  * For [thissugarcane](https://archiveofourown.org/users/thissugarcane/gifts).



> The line "peaceful to the point of indolence" is from Season 2 of the 2005 series, Episode 3 ("School Reunion"), written by Toby Whithouse.

> your curious life with me  
>  will be told so often  
>  that no one will believe  
>  you grew old
> 
> \-- Leonard Cohen, _The Big World_

 

Finally, after 3,449 years of being alive, the TARDIS ran out of rooms.  The Doctor discovered this when Sanka, a 13-year-old girl from 23rd-century Pacifica, Earth, came back into the control room, face still smeared with mud, and said, "Doctor? I can't find a washroom."

The Doctor looked appraisingly over her shoulder at the child.  Whatever the girl's enthusiasm for exploring the cosmos, if she was simple, this wasn't going to work out.

"It'll be in your bedroom," the Doctor said.

Sanka shook her head.  "I couldn't find a bedroom."

The Doctor sighed and pushed away from the console; she steered Sanka by the narrow shoulders back into the halls of the ship.  They passed the kitchen and the infirmary, then a large gallery with arched ceilings, and then turned right towards the bedrooms.  The Doctor stopped at the first door they came to and said, "Here."  She turned the doorknob, but the door wouldn't open.

"They're all locked," said Sanka, gesturing down the hallway.

The Doctor frowned and pulled the sonic screwdriver from a fold at the waist of her fisherman pants.  She pointed it at the doorknob, though there were no locking mechanisms attached to any of the bedrooms.

She shook her head and murmured, "What are you doing?"

The door swung open.

Inside the room, light from a hurricane lamp spilled onto a pile of red rugs.  The walls were dressed in murals of tall, ornately spired buildings; it was lined in bookcases crowded with bowls.  A healthy potted plant sat on the bedside table.  A young artist named Gino had lived in this room for almost a year; he had left in a hurry and died three hundred years ago from trauma to the skull.

"Oh, what a mess, how embarrassing!" said the Doctor, smiling over her shoulder at the little girl behind her.  "The maid's not been in.  No matter!  Down the hall."

The Doctor followed Sanka out of the bedroom and shut the door behind them.

The next door opened to reveal a bed and a row of picture windows: a long horizon, an ocean, a pale red sky, and white sea foam against a white sand beach.

"Dear dog," Sanka exclaimed. "That's not real, is it?"

"No," said the Doctor.

This room had belonged to Sona Pechuda, a brilliant scientist from one of the maritime tribes of Hapth; she'd been homesick, and the Doctor had been, at that point, finally realistic enough and desperate enough to not offer to take her home.  The Doctor squinted at a flock of swooping lorbels in the distance.  "Well, yes," she added.  "It is a real beach.  It is not really on my spaceship."

Sanka walked to the row of windows and put a tentative hand on the pane.  She looked back at the Doctor.  "How many rooms does this ship have?"

"Plenty," said the Doctor.  "Come with me."

The Doctor led Sanka down several hallways, explaining the intricacies of Time Lord architecture and the complexities of fifth dimension hyperpotential placement, space within no space, darting left and right without pausing.  She stopped intermittently, but each room they came to was locked and filled with relics.

Finally, the Doctor came to an abrupt stop before a door.  She stood grimly for a moment before unlocking the door and pushing it open.  The room was smaller than the others, filled with knick-knacks, clothes, metal-framed furniture.

The Doctor sank down onto the twin-sized bed; out of habit, she pulled the Union Jack t-shirt off of the bedknob and bunched it in her hands, nervously, like a secret.

"She's full," she said.

For over a millennium, there had been new rooms.  There had been new, strange hallways leading new places-- not only bedrooms and bathrooms, but laboratories, studios, galleries, pool halls.  There had been life in abundance, inexhaustible life.  The Doctor had never heard of a TARDIS, even an antique model, filling up.

But no Time Lord before had ever quite matched the Doctor's gluttony for companionship.

Sanka hovered uneasily in the doorway.

The Doctor looked up at her, and suddenly her face split in a grin.  She clapped her hands down on her knees.  "Nakamura Sanka," she said jovially.  "For our first intergalactic adventure, we're going to do a bit of spring cleaning."

"Spring?" said Sanka, nose wrinkling with worry.  "What is that?"

 

*

 

Sanka had been a mechanical engineering student at a vocational boarding school for five years before she left in the night with a pack of meal bars, a bottle of sanitizer, a datapad and no thought for a second suit of clothes.  Two days later, when truancy officers had followed her into a restaurant in Ulaanbaatar, she'd slid into the booth across from the Doctor, small face tight with determination.

The Doctor had looked up from an ancient-looking science magazine with brown, tired-looking eyes; she wore a black linen wrap shirt, salmon-colored fisherman pants and ginger hair that hung around her shoulders in tangled curls.  Despite all assurances from her teachers that it could never happen, she had regenerated sixteen times and all her parts still worked: her mind, her ship and both her hearts.

Sanka had pulled the Doctor's white short coat across the tabletop, draped it across her shoulders and leaned against the high back of the booth.  "Just talk to me," she'd said.

So the Doctor had closed her magazine and told a Debrayit fairy tale about a prince who lived far away in a fortress, who had no servants or cooks or janitors to tend him because he could do all jobs himself; his fortress was surrounded by a lake made of crystal; every text ever written was stored in his library, and there was one document file that no one could open.

The Doctor was carrying on about Denari astropolitics when the truancy officers approached their table and set down a datapad that said the girl had been committed to the care of her school.  It had all gone poorly, predictably, and they'd been chased by the truancy officers; they'd tumbled down a steep hillside on their way to the ship, ruining Sanka's one shirt and smearing her face with mud.

 

*

 

Sanka chose the bedroom with the most technologically advanced bathroom.  She cleaned herself and dressed in a long yellow shirt and grey knee-length shorts that she found in another room's closet.  Together, she and the Doctor emptied the room of everything but the bed.  The Doctor carried the books to the library, where stacks of books had already overflowed to the tabletops and floor.

After that was done, they cleaned out six of the surrounding rooms until that stretch of hallway was crowded with objects: mounds of fabric, careful stacks of plates and cups, canvases, a drum set, weapons, lamps and towers of paperback novels.

The Doctor was running a wet rag over a bathroom wall when she heard Sanka say from the bedroom, "Doctor?"

The word still sounded like a title in her voice.  After some weeks, the Doctor knew, as she became a person rather than an entity, the word would begin to feel less formal to Sanka; more like a name.

"Yes?" she answered.

Sanka appeared in the doorway, holding a broom.  "The people who lived in all these rooms-- who were they?"

The Doctor looked over from where she knelt on the bathroom floor.

The advantage of taking children with you on amazing space adventures was that they lasted longer and rarely developed acute, inappropriate sexual fixations on you, but the disadvantage was that you had to take care to traumatize them less, or at least more slowly.

Sanka was just beginning to mature into adulthood; at an age when her guardians might have talked to her about procreation and life, the Doctor would necessarily talk to her about mortality and time.

"They were my family," she said.

Sanka's eyes widened.  " _All_ of them?"  They'd passed forty or fifty doorways to come here, and Sanka would've seen more down the hallway.

"Well," said the Doctor, "Space Adventurers have very large families, like rabbits or ants.  This is a natural adaptation, so that in times of crisis Space Adventurers within a family unit can hold hands, forming a chain from the space ship to the surface of a suitable planet."

"Okay," said Sanka, mouth twisting.  "I'm not stupid."

The Doctor shrugged one shoulder and turned back to the bathroom wall, grinning.

 

*

 

When the stack of books on the linen sheet was large enough, the Doctor made a second haul to the library.  It was a ten-minute walk to get there, and she thought to herself that in the years to come she and Sanka could sort through the library and clean out duplicate copies of books and periodicals, delete duplicate files, or arrange the books in a new, inventive order.  The library had gotten more and more cluttered, and the desks were crammed with devices from a thousand cultures and a thousand species, from the primitive to the exquisitely complex.

Crowded with mementos, the Doctor's ship was a mess.

If the Doctor had ever been inclined to travel with others of her kind, it might've been a scandal.  Time Lords necessarily had an appetite for eternity, and that required a lack of gravity toward objects, an inside that was removed from the outside.  

The Doctor, meanwhile, had never been able to master that objectivity; she was pulled; she was an interlocutor, an interloper.  She liked to talk.

The TARDIS hurtled through the universe at no speed, weightless, filled with artifacts from a thousand worlds.  The Doctor had always differed from other Time Lords in that she could never quite get over that.  It was a kind of lapse of faith.  She wanted to share her wonder with everyone she met.

 

*

 

The Doctor was sitting cross-legged in the hallway plucking the strings of a raghunatha veena when Sanka passed by her, arms full of clothes.

"Sanka," the Doctor said, and the girl paused, shifting the bundle of fabric to look down at her.  "Of course you know I was joking, earlier.  The people who lived in these rooms weren't my relatives. They were all different from each other, but they were like you and me."

Sanka raised a dark eyebrow.  Possibly she couldn't imagine what characteristic they might have shared-- what was common between the Doctor's guests, including Sanka, that resembled the space woman who otherwise lived alone and spoke aloud with gentleness to her broken ship.

"I mean they all wanted to go somewhere else," the Doctor said.  "They were travelers."

"What happened to them?" Sanka asked.  She sank to the hallway floor and rested her arms on the mound of clothes.

"Well, you know, different things.  Some of them got tired of gallivanting about the universe; some of them left to do other things, like teach or have children or start revolutions.  Some of them died.  Although one of them is immortal now.  And one turned into a planet!"

The Doctor leaned back, grinning, her long red hair cushioning her head against the wall.  Then she sighed.

"With very few exceptions, Sanka, humans can't travel forever.  Not even Space Adventurers can.  Everyone and everything stops, and some things stop sooner than others."

Sanka was silent for a long moment, watching the Doctor's hand move absently over the throat of the veena.

"They were _like_ family to you, though, it seems like."

Sanka said it wryly, as though she were interrogating the Doctor on her earlier evasion.  She was so intelligent.  But there was a question beneath it, too, like a shadow: if by extension Sanka would become like that.  It was a question about contact.  It spoke well of her that she focused on those matters; not the deaths, not the one immortal.  This was the gravitation toward objects.  The shifting network of circumstances that bound individuals together.

Time Lords had eschewed loyalties-- "peaceful to the point of indolence," as a creature had once put it-- but the peace of the Time Lords had been the smug contentment that everything was exactly as it should be.  It wasn't petty and circumstantial; it wasn't _inventive_.  In short, it wasn't human.  It wasn't the enormous satisfaction of running for your life, breathless, with a friend.

"Yes," said the Doctor, "yes, they were that."

 

*

 

From the piles in the hallway, Sanka selected a recliner, an antique notebook computer, an assortment of small statues, synthetic fiber clothes and rugs of various colors to spread out on her bedroom's tiled floor.  She carried them all into her new room and then came back to stand over the remaining clutter.  She put her hands in her pockets and said, "What now?"

The Doctor picked up a snowglobe.  "Don't you want this?"

Sanka shook her head.  "Uh, no, I'm okay."

"Well, then, I don't know," said the Doctor.  "I suppose we have to get rid of it."

"Do you have, like... a waste disposal shaft?"

The Doctor snorted and pulled a few bedsheets free from a pile of fabric.  "Space Adventurers don't litter."  She handed a sheet to Sanka and then spread out a second on the floor.  She placed the snowglobe in the center of the sheet and began stacking other delicate items around it.  Sanka spread out her sheet and dropped fistfuls of jewelry onto it.

"So what, then?" she asked.  "Deep storage?"

"We landed a few hours ago," said the Doctor, shaking her head.  She glanced sideways at Sanka and added, "Yard sale."

 

*

 

From the depths of her ship, the Doctor produced a cart on wheels, and she piled it high with bundles; then the two travelers pushed it out of the TARDIS onto the dune of a desert.  The metal wheels sank into the sand.  Around them was a crowded market.

"Oh, we're right here," said the Doctor.

Before them spread a vast bazaar: rows of stalls set out on blankets and an endless crowd of people, some laughing and talking, others with faces set in exhausted lines.  Behind them was the tall, blue box that had carried them here.  There was a high wall near them that stretched into the distance, and the only passage through it was a narrow canal; boats came through single-file with their passengers huddled over within the tight space.  At the mouth of the canal was an inscribed stone mound.  The Doctor pointed at it.

" _Welcome to the new world_ ," she translated.

"Where are we?" asked Sanka.

"This is where we're going to sell our stuff.  Look!" said the Doctor, pointing down the bustling line of stalls, "There's an empty booth!  We're going to need hats."

Sanka looked back with an expression of incredulous horror.  "You're kidding me," she said.

The Doctor ushered her forward by the narrow shoulders.  "The pointed blue ones are for vendors," she said.  Sanka dug her heels in, and the Doctor grinned broadly.  It never got old.

 

 


End file.
